It looks like the Chinese government is taking a heavy hand when it comes to malicious activity in online gaming. A recent trojan managed to accrue the two writers around $140,000, but a large team of people working with them could take that total into the millions. Now they all look set to pay the price with a few years in jail.

The trojan targeted online games and managed to steal over 5 million user names and passwords while it was active. Those were then used for malicious purposes, but the exact details of what was done with them has not been released other than to state online credit was stolen. Even though the virus was originally written by just two people it is thought as many as 80 people were involved in the fraud.

So far 11 people have been handed sentences. The trojan developers, Lu Yizhong and Zeng Yifu, got three years and two-and-a-half years respectively. Nine other people have received lesser sentences and the group of 11 needs to pay a fine of around $120,000. The action doesn’t stop there though, as the government is going after all people involved meaning another 69 individuals could end up in jail for their part in this scam as well as having to pay fines.

Whether this action makes others think twice about attempting similar scams in not known, but the 217 million online gamers across China may just be too tempting to pass up for malware writers.

There are very few details about how the trojan managed to be so successful but it must have infiltrated many Internet cafes as that’s how a lot of Chinese play online games. That is unless it somehow managed to take hold of an account from within the game, but without more detail we don’t know. I also think a lot of the money the original creators made was from selling on the virus hence the 80 strong team of people involved.

I doubt this will stop others attempting the same thing as the rewards are potentially so big. This trojan only managed to get 5 million accounts of the 217 million players that exist. $140,000 is also not a small amount of money making the risk worthwhile for some.

The government must have tracked the people behind this down through the money transactions that were occurring. It’s difficult for a bank not to notice such large sums of money passing through an account and no doubt there are strict monitoring rules imposed by the government.